Just once did we pause on the way.  One evening our ship turned in its course and made directly for the land.  It seemed that we must be dashed upon the headlands we were approaching, but as we drew nearer they parted, and we entered the land-locked harbor of Acapulco, the chief Mexican port on the Pacific.  It was an amphitheatre dotted with twinkling lights.  Our ship was speedily surrounded by small boats of all descriptions, wherein sat merchants noisily calling upon us to purchase their wares.  They had abundant fruits, shells, corals, curios.  They flashed them in the light of their torches; they baited us to bargain with them.  It was a Venetian fete with a vengeance; for the hawkers were sometimes more impertinent than polite.  It was a feast of lanterns, and not without the accompaniment of guitars and castanets, and rich, soft voices.

After that we were eager for the end of it all.  There was Santa Catalina, off the California coast, then an uninhabited island given over to sunshine and wild goats, now one of the most popular and populous of California summer and winter resorts—­for ’tis all the same on the Pacific coast; one season is damper than the other, that is the only difference.  The coast grew bare and bleak; the wind freshened and we were glad to put on our wraps.  And then at last, after a journey of nearly five thousand miles, we slowed up in a fog so dense it dripped from the scuppers of the ship; we heard the boom of the surf pounding upon the invisible shore, and the hoarse bark of a chorus of sea-lions, and were told we were at the threshold of the Golden Gate, and should enter it as soon as the fog lifted and made room for us.

[Illustration:  Fort Point at the Golden Gate]

IV.

IN THE WAKE OF DRAKE

We were buried alive in fathomless depths of fog.  We were a fixture until that fog lifted.  It was an impenetrable barrier.  Upon the point of entering one of the most wonderful harbors in the world, the glory of the newest of new lands, we found ourselves prisoners, and for a time at least involved in the mazes of ancient history.

In 1535 Cortez coasted both sides of the Gulf of California—­first called the Sea of Cortez; or the Vermilion Sea, perhaps from its resemblance to the Red Sea between Arabia and Egypt; or possibly from the discoloration of its waters near the mouth of the Rio Colorado, or Red River.

In 1577 Captain Drake, even then distinguished as a navigator, fitted out a buccaneering expedition against the Spaniards; it was a wild-goose chase and led him round the globe.  In those days the wealth of the Philippines was shipped annually in a galleon from Manila to Acapulco, Mexico, on its way to Europe.  Drake hoped to intercept one of these richly laden galleons, and he therefore threaded the Straits of Magellan, and, sailing northward, found himself, in 1579, within sight of the coast of California.